Documents: FBI investigated slain border mayor

Raúl Antonio Rodríguez Barrera, the former mayor of the Mexican border city of Miguel Alemán who was gunned down last year, had been under investigation by the FBI for narcotics trafficking, according to documents released in response to an open records request.

The heavily redacted, 177-page file says that after he became mayor of Miguel Alemán, across the Rio Grande from Roma, in 1998, Rodríguez, a former federal prosecutor, ran a loose confederation of drug trafficking groups in the Miguel Alemán plaza, the term used to describe the drug trafficking routes in a geographic area. The file also contains information about a 1999 homicide in Starr County, presumably committed by traffickers connected to Rodriguez.

Translated, La Lucha Social means the social struggle. This title makes reference to the collective effort of numerous loosely organized sub organizations extensively involved in drug trafficking to bring a social change to the state government in Tamaulipas, Mexico. This change involves the removal of the current Governor of Tamaulipas who is identified as Tomas Yarrington. Yarrington is viewed as a political thorn and operates a philosophy counter to what the local government run by Raul Antonio Rodriguez Barrera in the City of Miguel Aleman, Mexico believes is correct – greater and unrestricted drug trafficking.

Tomás Yarrington Ruvalcaba is the former governor of Tamaulipas, the Mexican state that border Texas from Brownsville to Laredo, who’s under indictment in Brownsville on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and financial crimes. Prosecutors allege he took bribes from the Gulf Cartel and their erstwhile enforcers, the Zetas. He’s a fugitive, but has maintained his innocence through web postings and his lawyers.

The documents go on to explain the drug trafficking situation in Miguel Alemán in 1999:

Drugs smuggled across this area by the referenced groups are distributed throughout the U.S. and are transported via various means.
The operation of these groups is difficult to define in that they do not follow strict guidelines or do not operate under the typical modus operandi that law enforcement attaches to MDTOs (Mexican drug trafficking organizations).
These groups are a loose conglomerate who work in concert one day and may be involved in a turf dispute the next. The success of the MDTOs lies in the cohesive leadership provided by individuals like Raul Antonio Rodriguez. Physical and violent struggles for power are absent among these groups when compared to others in Mexico. This reality is typified by the relative absence of drug related murders. Recent drug related murders have involved outside powerful MDTos who are either attempting to take over part of this corridor or who are settling past unresolved disputes.
The operation is best described as atypical and fluid. Whatever the measure, the reality is that these groups have somehow co-existed for generations under a protective umbrella centered from a base of power in Miguel Aleman. This power base is now controlled by Raul Antonio Rodriguez. Rodriguez also owns the local television affiliate, newspaper and radio station. His brand of news releases and political opinions have swayed the local populace.

This is the situation that Jose Carlos Hinojosa, at the time a young clerk with the Mexican federal prosecutor’s office, would have found when he arrived in Miguel Alemán in 2000. At a trial last year, Hinojosa testified that he was tasked with collecting bribes from all the local drug traffickings.

Everything changed the following year, he said, when Gulf Cartel, based downstream in Matamoros, sent its then-enforcers the Zetas to take over Miguel Alemán.

The Zetas “were in charge of picking up people, of murdering people, of spreading terror in the plazas,” Hinojosa testified, and they quickly grabbed control of Miguel Alemán:

It was in about mid-2001 that they gathered up all of us that worked in the security agencies, government employees that had anything to do with security or law enforcement, and they kind of read the rules to us. They established the rules to be followed and that we were not to interfere with or bother any of the trafficking or anybody else that they told us that we were not to bother, that they were to be allowed to work freely.

The region around Miguel Alemán has been on the front line of the war between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas since the two gangs split in 2010. That year, cartel gunmen overran the nearby town of Ciudad Mier.